Looking for advice for Water Elemental Shader

Hello, First Time Poster :flushed: I am trying to achieve something similar to the water elementals in the new Disney movie. This is for a mobile Unity Game :slight_smile:

I am currently drafting my model and shaders and I was wondering if people had any insights tips on how to achieve this. Here is what I currently have

Video

I have a small glow based on a sphere distance field inside. A fresnel effect that samples a multicolored cubemap. Vertex Animation and texture animation.

I was thinking about doing a Simple Parallax to feel like there were some bubbles going from top to bottom.

Other than that, I am a bit lost, should I add VFXs of droplets around the mesh, other type of deformation ?
Thank you for any feedbacks, I am pretty begginner as it comes to this.

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Hey, did you get any progress?
I would give parallax mapping a try, maybe fade it out on the edges using fresnel. For the bubbles inside, either try parallax again or use real particles inside the mesh, but it might be tricky in terms of transparency sorting. One thing that might help is Stencil Buffer. You render the head using ZTest LEqual and write into stencil mask buffer. Then you render the bubbles using ZTest Always, ignoring all depth testings, and mask that using the face-stencil.

Matcap with some specular cubemap with an overlay of wobbly distorted caustics textures panning across the uv will do the trick!

Keeping in mind it’s for mobile, keeping it low budget is key, thus why I think the matcap approachg will fit like a glove.

Heck, even the cubemap could be waved if your performance constraints call for it. Good luck.